Volume 8, No. 3

Jude the Obscure, the last full-length novel written by Thomas Hardy, describes Jude’s ethical choice to move from the countryside to the city in pursuit of his ideals and the process of the identity transformation from farmer to industrial worker. According to the main concepts of ethical literary criticism, the path of life is the process of constantly constructing new ethical identities and making ethical choices. Jude’s attempts to construct a cross-class ethical identity through self- education, aspiring to become a university student or enter the priesthood, and his endeavor to establish an ethical identity as a free man through marriage with Sue, who ardently pursues freedom, were ultimately unsuccessful due to their incongruity with the prevailing ethical milieu of late Victorian society. Jude’s ethical choices pose a challenge to the decadent education system and hypocritical marriage system of that era, while also serving as a critique of the capitalist system’s suppression of talent. Through Hardy’s narration and commentary on Jude’s failed ethical decision, readers can gain a critical understanding of the nature of the late Victorian social system and find guidance for making appropriate ethical choices in their own lives.

The world-renowned short story “Rashomon” unfolds its narrative along two contrasting ethical lines: the “daylight” within the order and the “night” beyond the order. Set in the fictional historical period of the Heian era, a low-ranking samu- rai retainer was confronted with the dilemma of “starving to death” or “becoming a robber.” To be specific, his hesitation to make a decision was due to the constraints of his ethical identity as a samurai and his sentimental personality. At this time, on the Rashomon gate in a chaotic world, the retainer encountered an old woman plucking hair from dead bodies. This sparked off a confrontation with the retainer believing plucking hair from the dead an unforgivable “evil,” while the old woman argued that survival justified any means. Inspired by this, the retainer committed the violent act of stripping the old woman of her clothes, officially descending into “evil.” However, this “evil” disrupted the old order from the outside and recon- structed a new ethical framework, thereby achieving a “transformation” of ethical cognition, and thus a new life.

Ethical identity, as one of the core terms of Ethical Literary Criticism, is different from the personality identity in the traditional Western metaphysical philosophy, nor from the identity in the Western cultural studies. The age of AI is reshaping our understanding of ethical identity across various domains, including literature. The rise of AI in literary creation raises questions about the ethical identity of both authors and readers. These questions challenge the boundaries of authorship and creativity, prompting a reevaluation of what it means to be an author in the digital age. Similarly, with the popularization of AI-generated contents, readers may need to develop new skills to critically engage with texts, discerning between human and machine-generated narratives. This shift requires readers to adopt a more active role in interpreting and understanding literature, potentially reshaping their ethical identity as participants in the literary process. The writer would have to become a craftsman or a mixer, mediator or gatekeeper of the resulting artificial work. The traditonal concept “reader” is shifted to co-producer or a “prosumer.” As AI technologies continue to evolve, they challenge traditional notions of identity, agency, and creativity, prompting us to rethink our ethical frameworks and responsibilities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, leveraging advanced language models, acquire and emulate human literary creation. These tools exhibit the ability to rapidly generate a substantial volume of diverse multimodal literary works, cater to individualized reader preferences, and engage in interactive exchanges with readers, thereby fostering a paradigm of collaborative creation between humans and AI. In the era of AI, the roles of authors, literary works, readers, and critics will undergo significant transformations. AI literature poses challenges to existing literary theories that define traditional concepts in literature, thereby necessitating the reconstruction and advancement of literary criticism. Ethical literary criticism (ELC) with its interdisciplinary attributes, is dedicated to using scientific theoretical methods to study the mechanisms of literary creation and its ethical implications. Building on its original theoretical framework, ELC actively addresses the issues and needs arising from AI literature research. Nie Zhenzhao’s definitions of language and text facilitate the study of future literary types and their significance. The narrative, aesthetics, and educational aspects of AI literature will also become focal points and domains for further innovation and development in ELC. The scientific selection phase represents the AI

There are quite a few discussions about the connection between Park Chanwook’s film Decision To Leave and novelist Kim Seungok’s A Trip to Mujin. A Trip to Mujin is a novel that has already been adapted into movies and dramas four times, and it is evaluated that the narrative and expression style of modern Korean novels have changed since this novel was published. The male characters in A Trip to Mujin and Decision To Leave are all successful middle-class elites who are socially recognized and have stable families. They meet a special woman in what is described as the fog space of Mujin and Ipoh and face an urge to break away from the existing world or to break it down. However, A Trip to Mujin’s man escapes from the aspect of his desire self and returns to the family and workplace where his wife is located, returning to the ethical me. A man in Decision To Leave tries to get away from his existing life and plan a future different from that of a woman who resembles his original self, but fails. In the two works, the men are the figures of Odysseus who met the Siren, and they are characters who wander between his wife and other women and explore themselves. Accordingly, A Trip to Mujin and Decision To Leave can be said to be works with the characteristics of making women the other for the modern male subject who impulsively and returns between social ethics and personal ethics. The thoughts and wandering toward the existence of this modern male subject are effectively reproduced through an artistic device called fog, and the aspects of the multi-layered self are revealed or concealed in the fog, which can be said to be a metaphor for human conflict and agony toward me.

The deepening globalization has led to repeated interpretations and redefinitions of the concept of “World Literature,” simultaneously igniting a fervent wave of rewriting world literature history. Comprehending “World Literature” stands as a crucial prerequisite for reconstructing the history of world literature. However, the essence of what constitutes World Literature has remained an unresolved enigma within the realm of literary studies. Fang Weigui’s book, Tracing the Origins of “World Literature”, sheds light on this matter by illuminating historical truths and engaging in mutual verification between history and theory. Employing a conceptual history approach, the book delves into the verbal dimension of “World Literature,” conceptualizing it as a free exchange of spiritual goods. It underscores that World Literature is the exchange itself, thereby opening up fresh avenues of thought to grapple with the crucial tension between the locality and universality of World Literature. Moreover, it offers a novel perspective for reflecting on the central debate surrounding the center and periphery of World Literature, serving as a fresh starting point for rewriting the history of world literature.